WhyOvercoming
Consumerism?

Imagine yourself dwelling in the following
world:

You live in a safe pleasant and unpolluted community where you
actually know your neighbors and interact with them, be it a small
town, a suburb or even a city neighborhood. You can easily walk,
bicycle or take effective mass transit to your nearby job, giving you
time to think or read as you get there.

The work that you do improves our future, benefits
your community and means something to you and those with whom you
interact. You actually look forward to Monday. The longer that you
are employed the more you learn and the more valuable you become to
your employer with an increasing level of pay.

Your work schedule leaves you sufficient time to enjoy your friends,
family and outside interests. Money isn't a controlling influence in
your life because your needs are easily met. Your possessions are
few, yet of high quality, thus allowing your home to be small, neat and
inexpensive to own or rent.

You're connected to your surroundings, rather than
just dwelling in them, your backyard, for example, provides most of
the produce you might need plus a surplus that you can trade with
neighbors. You have a stake in your community and participate in
local decision making at the Town Council, P.T.A. and other grass
roots organizations.. You buy what is necessary in nearby
establishments whose owners are known to you and live in your
community. If you have children, they walk to a nearby well-funded
neighborhood school in safety and then learn authentic social skills
as they interact with a community of honorably employed adults when
away from school.

Occasionally you need to travel to a large store
on the edge of town. You do this on a free shuttle bus or perhaps in
a simple, older vehicle, the use and costs of which you might share
with others or a car that you rent only when you need it, thus
preserving for yourself the weeks or months that it takes to earn the
thousands of after-tax Dollars that owning a new car would take away
from you each year. Your interests, the things that you really like
to do with your mind and your hands, all the possibilities of your
life, are there to be explored because you have the time, energy and money to do so.

"But this is America, you say, all this is possible."

"Not anymore it's not".

(Editor's note: that was first written in the 1990s when this page was posted.

You know what's happened to the economy and our country since then)

There are growing forces making this way of life almost impossible to
attain or maintain, even for the wealthy. If you are among the lucky
few who still have the kind of life outlined above, these same forces
threaten you. Whether you live in an isolated small town or prefer
your anonymity as well as the multiplicity of things available to you
in a big city, these same forces will are eroding your security and
ability to make choices for yourself.

Do you think what's outlined at the beginning of this page can only
occur in some mythic long-past small town? Before the hegemony of
consumerism and bottom-line Wall Street economics, you could do all of these
things anywhere, including in our cities. There is no reason that we
cannot live like this again if sufficient people work to identify and
disempower the forces that promote and profit from limiting our
social and economic horizons.

These forces are manifested in our lives as
consumerism. People voluntarily hand over their soverignty as Americans and citizens in exchange for
things and conveniences that sap and paralyze our ability to fight the forces that are weakening our
real economy and our ability to affect change in it.

The process began innocently enough. At first they were a growing number of pleasant
conveniences for housewives in the 1950s, then a car for everyone
with the gradual and inevitable erosion of mass transit, then the ubiquitousness of
things and chemical products technologically unimaginable a few
decades earlier.

With this came a growing a availability of consumer credit and
debt to make things available, the over-dependence on labor-saving devices, total dependence
on the car and absolute necessity of full time work, the two income
household to pay for more and more, then the importation of cheaper
and cheaper goods and the disappearance of manufacturing jobs,
the commodification of labor and the discarding of loyalties to our citizens and taxpayers
and now the decline of service work with professionals next to be
downsized....The ongoing disenfranchisement of people from our own
community, replaced by commercial transactions with distant
strangers...where will it end? When America looks like some faded
Third World fragment of the old British Empire? An overpopulated
wasteland of pollution, eroded landscapes, worn out infrastructure
and hungry people digging into landfills for salvageables?
With real unemployment above 20% and manufacturing being outsourced at new levels, this vision is
looking more and more tangible. The Middle Class is dying.

We shouldn't allow this to happen. Things may be
starting to turn around in our favor. But it takes work and time and
attention to details and a willingness to try new things for our own
and our children's benefit. There are serious changes ahead. We can
control some of these for our benefit or we can just react to them
after they have happened--or worse yet, ignore the changes and pretend that they do not matter.

Simply stated, there is a lot of money being made and a lot of power
being gathered by the people that promote consumerism. You pay for it
in gradually limited economic mobility, pollution, threats to your
health and a declining standard of living, as measured by the things
that really matter.

This is what this site is about, identifying these forces and
showcasing opportunities to lessen or eliminate their control over
your life through the completion of everyday things, that in the
aggregate, fight the big battles. We're not suggesting that you
pick up guns and start blasting away. What we advocate does far more
damage than bullets to these forces and the people behind them and
makes life much more enjoyable for you while it returns to you the
possibility of living the way that you choose. We cannot rely on politicians because if they have any
true power they have been bought and paid for and if they haven't
been bought and paid for they probably don't have any real power.
(with a few notable local exceptions).

In addition to the everyday things that
you can do, there are concepts that need to be
discussed and not just in a trite way. The mantra "Reduce,
Reuse and Recycle" is pregnant with meaning, and reflects
worthwhile goals, but it hardly contains solutions to the
real integral problems of the world. For example, why
doesn't America have decent mass transit? We provide links
further along in the site to allow you to see what we
once had, what happened to it and what can be done to
bring it back. (Image: after General Motors bought up many
of America's streetcar lines and replaced them with diesel
busses the streetcars were burned so that they could never
return to the street to compete with less efficient
busses.)

Howconsumerism
affects society,

the
economy and the Environment.

Consumerism
is economically manifested in the chronic purchasing of new goods and
services, with little attention to their true need, durability,
product origin or the environmental consequences of manufacture and
disposal. Consumerism is driven by huge sums spent on advertising
designed to create both a desire to follow trends, and the resultant
personal self-reward system based on acquisition. Materialism is one
of the end results of consumerism.

Consumerism
interferes with the workings of society by replacing the normal
common-sense desire for an adequate supply of life's necessities,
community life, a stable family and healthy relationships with an
artificial ongoing and insatiable quest for things and the money to
buy them with little regard for the true utility of what is bought.
An intended consequence of this, promoted by those who profit
from consumerism, is to accelerate the discarding of the old, either
because of lack of durability or a change in fashion.

Landfills
swell with cheap discarded products that fail early and
cannot be repaired. Products are made psychologically
obsolete long before they actually wear out. A generation is
growing up without knowing what quality goods are.
Friendship, family ties and personal autonomy are only
promoted as a vehicle for gift giving and the rationale for
the selection of communication services and personal
acquisition. Everything becomes mediated through the
spending of money on goods and services. Human beings who cannot spend become worthless.

It
is an often stated catechism that the economy would improve if people
just bought more things, bought more cars and spent more money.
Financial resources better spent on Social Capital such as
education, nutrition, housing etc. are spent on products of dubious
value and little social return. In addition, the purchaser is robbed
by the high price of new things, the cost of the credit to buy them,
and the less obvious expenses such as, in the case of automobiles,
increased registration, insurance, repair and maintenance
costs.

Many
consumers run out of room in their homes to store the things that
they buy. A rapidly growing industry in America is that of
self-storage. Thousands of acres of land good farm land are paved
over every year to build these cities of orphaned and unwanted things
so as to give people more room to house the new things that they are
persuaded to buy. If these stored products were so essential in the
first place, why do they need to be warehoused? An overabundance of
things lessens the value of what people possess.

"You
work in a job you hate, to buy stuff that you don't need, to impress
people that you don't like."

-
Fight Club

Malls
have replaced parks, churches and community gatherings for many who
no longer even take the trouble to meet their neighbors or care to
know their names. People move frequently as though neighborhoods and
cities were products to be tried out like brands of deodorant.

Consumerism
sets each person against themself in an endless quest for
the attainment of material things or the imaginary world
conjured up and made possible by things yet to be
purchased. Weight training, diet centers, breast
reduction, breast enhancement, cosmetic surgery,
permanent eye make-up, liposuction, collagen injections,
these are are some examples of people turning
themselves into human consumer goods more suited for
the "marketplace" than living in a healthy balanced
society.

The
mindset of humans as consumer objects triumphs when women,
failing to meet the standards dictated by the availability
of the above "services", are traded in for a "newer model".
This same way of thinking allows parents to justify entering
their little girls in beauty contests as though they were
prize livestock.

Here's
the affect that unobtainable good looks have on the happiness of the
"average" person:

Why beautiful people create an ugly mood
by Robert Uhlig

BEAUTY makes the world an unhappier place, say two mathematicians who have calculated the ideal way to match lonely hearts to their soulmates.
Conventionally good looking people such as Kate Moss, George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Lopez, may be pleasing to the eye, but their very presence in our midst makes the world a less contented place, the research suggests.
At fault is the so-called Vogue factor, a measure of how much influence beauty has in society. The higher the Vogue factor, the mathematicians said, the more dissatisfied and miserable we are with our sexual partners...

"Even if the more beautiful players have a larger satisfaction by far, the general dissatisfaction in the system increases." With television, cinema and magazines such as Vogue bombarding us with images of beautiful women and good looking men conforming to a standardised concept of beauty, overall levels of dissatisfaction were likely to increase.

Working with Andrea Capocci of Fribourg University in Switzerland, Dr Caldarelli updated the stable marriage problem, a mathematical puzzle first examined in 1962 by two University of California researchers.

David Gale and Lloyd Shapley's 1962 study found that provided the criteria for choosing partners - wit, beauty, intelligence, wealth or whatever - had no intrinsic value in society, then everybody should end up with a partner with whom they were reasonably happy.
New Scientist reports today. "The result of this makes distressing reading for the plain and ordinary. With beauty on the scene, you're now much less likely to be matched with your number one choice, unless you happen to be one of the beautiful people yourself."

"Each year an estimated 1.5 million
Americans choose to have nose jobs, tummy tucks or breast
enlargements. Many of these people would be unable to afford
these vital surgical procedures if it were not for the
public spirited efforts of loan companies like Jayhawk
Acceptance Corporation, a used car lender that has turned to
covering the booming demand for elective surgery. Lenders in
this field face an unusual challenge," explains the Wall
Street Journal: "A lender can take a used car but can hardly
repossess a face lift." Consequently lenders like Jayhawk
have to charge a slightly higher interest rate, up to 22.5%
to be exact. Says Michael Smartt, Jayhawk CEO, "We're
capitalizing on America's vanity."

IF you don't look like
this- well then they say that society thinks that you're
ugly!

It is impossible to win a war against yourself or your
uncontrolled desires.

A good example of this is the simplistic
materialist psychosis of the bumper sticker:

"He
who dies with the most toys wins"

Is
psychosis too strong a word to use here? Appreciate the following
line of reasoning:

"I can imagine it, therefore I want it. I want it, therefore I should
have it. Because I should have it, I need it. Because I need it, I
deserve it. Because I deserve it, I will do anything necessary to get
it."

This is the artificial internal drive that the advertisers tap into.
You "imagine it" because they bombard your consciousness with its
image until you then move to step two, "I want it...etc. " This is
one of the things that allows people to surrender to consumerism. As
a society we have gone from self-sufficiency based on our internal
common sense of reasonable limits to the ridiculous goal of Keeping
up with the Jones then to stampeding for the Lifestyles of the Rich
and Famous, or at least as far as our credit limit or home equity
line allows us to go.

The New
Road Map Foundation illustrates
with cogent statistics the dichotomy between things, happiness and
the health of the environment.

Happiness
can't be purchased in the marketplace, no matter how much advertising
tries to convince you of it. Market driven forces have ursurped the
role once assumed by family, home, common-sense and community. We
have been programmed to believe that we should pursue more money to
spend on more things offered in the marketplace, to be living
mannequins for the material adornments of the hour, our worth
determined by what we have or don't have, rather than what we
are,
what we do or what we know.

Consumerism,
already having captured death as a consumer obligation whereby
sadness and regret are quenched by spending lots of money, now turns
major life events like weddings and births into
consumer events with their own hierarchy of demands for the
things which assume a life of their own. For example, the bride's
dress and accessories assumes far more significance in the telling
than the bride's state of mind. Baby shower gifts take precedence
over helping with the baby.

Consumerism has crossed the last frontier into memories.
Underemployed people all over America are buying supplies to start
their own 'business' selling scrapbook supplies so that people can
gain the 'appropriate' access to their own history.

Recreation has become commercialized. Special leisure clothing,
sporting equipment and attendance at expensive sporting events rife
with advertising and corporate sponsorship are the manifestation of
consumerism in recreation. Oakland, California, a community with high
levels of unemployment and poverty has banks that are now creating
special loan categories so that people can get personal lines of
credit to buy season tickets to the taxpayer-financed
stadium.

"Sports
is another crucial example of the indoctrination system . . . It
offers people something to pay attention to that is of no importance
. . . It keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their
lives that they might have an idea of something about . . . People
have the most exotic information and understanding about all sorts of
arcane issues . . . It's a way of building up irrational attitudes of
submission to authority, and group cohesion behind leadership
elements, in fact its training in irrational jingoism . . . That's
why energy is devoted to supporting them . . . and advertisers are
willing to pay for them."

Noam
Chomsky from Manufacturing Consent

Pro-sports contribute
next-to-nothing to communities economically yet they are
sucking public dollars that could be better spent on parks,
schools and public services into millionaires/billionaire's
pockets and deluding a whole generation of at-risk youth
into believing in the possibility of an "athletic career".

Sports
Still No Ticket Out Of The Ghetto

Professional
sports are are just an example of synthesized and packaged
reality designed to enrich people already rich, subject the observer
to yet another layer of advertising, and to maintain the intellectual
impoverishment of those watching.

"College-sports
any better? Football is the S.U.V. of the college campus:
aggressively big, resource-guzzling, lots and lots of fun and
potentially destructive of everything around it. Big-time teams
award 85 scholarships and, with walk-ons, field rosters of 100 or
more players. (National Football League teams make do with half
that.) At the highest level, universities wage what has been
called an ''athletic arms race'' to see who can build the most
lavish facilities to attract the highest-quality players. Dollars
are directed from general funds and wrestled from donors, and what
does not go into cherry-wood lockers, plush carpets and
million-dollar weight rooms ends up in the pockets of coaches, the
most exalted of whom now make upward of $2 million a year. .
.College sports now consists of a class of super-behemoths --
perhaps a dozen or so athletic departments with budgets of $40
million and up -- and a much larger group of schools that face the
choice of spending themselves into oblivion or being embarrassed
on the field." N.Y.Times Magazine 12/22/02

Take
all the mental and sometimes physical energy, the money and the time
that the average American spends on professional and college sports
and divert it to the care and maintenance of local public schools; we
could be the best educated people in the world! Notice how recent
talk about revitalizing our schools revolves around the purchase of
computer equipment rather than raising teacher's salaries
and spending more money per pupil?

Local
sports teams and activities like Little League and Youth Soccer are
healthy and wonderful. There is however, a tendency of the ongoing
commercialization of even these IF people allow it.

The
constant cycle of work and consumption is destructive enough of
values, but when extra hours must be worked to maintain the same
level of consumption, or when insufficient work, or no work at all is
available, and a family goes into debt to accumulate more things, or
feels worthless because of a lack of the "right" possessions,
consumerism is slow societal suicide.

Time,
the precious shrinking commodity of our lives, is exchanged for money
to buy things that there usually is little time to enjoy. What time
is left after work is often devoured by television, basically a
series of ever-more mediocre filler programs inserted between
ever-more-spectacular commercials whose purpose is to stoke further
desire for more things. When these insatiable material desires fail
to be satisfied, people grow unhappy with their lives and in extreme
cases riot and loot to get that they have been "programmed" to
want.

People
become used to the intrusion of advertising into their
consciousness in the form of television or the massive bundle of
advertising pulp that masquerades as a Sunday newspaper and and so
they fail to protect themself, or worse, their children from being
seduced by it. Convinced that their self worth is based on $500
athletic shoes or designer clothing, children are already on the road
to spiritual dissatisfaction and resentment as well as a perception
of diminished self-worth. When they become adolescents they are
probably not going to be happy or productive even were they provided
with an endless supply of things that few parents could afford. An
extreme example of this is when some, usually poor adults, who could
often better use the money for education, nutrition and improved
housing, demonstrate their self worth and strength of character by
turning themselves into human billboards in plastic clothing
advertising millionaire's sports franchises. Their children may, to
the detriment of education, pin all hopes on an athletic "career",
i.e. lots of money for endorsing consumer items. This is nation
building?

Where once parents shared the home with their adult children, acting
as baby-sitters and providers of wisdom and tradition, we now have
corporate owned day care and rest homes. This preservation of nuclear
family ties is one reason that some immigrant groups are still able
to excel economically until the second generation (usually) becomes
affected by consumerism, abandons its parents' values and then often
goes overboard using material objects as a means of
self-identification with American society.

"Quality
Time" has become a commodity unto itself. Unfortunately, there is no
marketplace for quality time, you have to preserve it for yourself.
Why not use the time in your life, skip the money and the taxation
and go straight for the happiness that usually comes from the
non-material? This process is part of overcoming
consumerism.

EconomicCOSTS
OF CONSUMERISM

The
more consumerism spreads, the weaker is the incentive to manufacture
long-lasting, quality products, and the greater the likelihood that
cheaply made products will instead be imported from the lowest-wage,
environmentally unregulated overseas manufacturer that mobile
capital, ever seeking the highest return, can find.

The nationwide loss of
manufacturing jobs leads to a corresponding growth in
unemployment and the number of welfare recipients, less
personal wealth, a shrinking tax base, fewer public
services, and greater public and private debt,
hopelessness for job seekers and a growing negative
balance of trade. Americans can't really afford to buy
the house next door but guess who has lots of dollars to
spend here because of the money that we're exporting to
buy their cheap junk?

By facilitating the sale of
whatever is advertised and sold, without examination by
the purchaser of quality, origin, environmental
degradation or traditions of manufacture, Consumerism
fuels the destruction of the productive
economy. That was written in 2002. So how's that Global Economy doing for you and your family now?

What
about the argument that "we are in a global marketplace and exports
(and therefore imports) create jobs?"

The
flood of spending on imports creates a need for compensating export
earnings. This quest for export earnings turns the U.S. into a
traitor to principles that this nation supposedly fought for in
several recent wars, and generates an eagerness to embrace potential
export markets, no matter what the human rights or environmental
records of these countries may be, or how much damage this does to
American workers. Another part of this attempted juggling act of
trade balances is to justify the further strip-mining of our own
natural heritage in order to gain further export earnings, i.e.
Redwood logs from our ancient cathedral forests are sent to Mexico to
be milled on machinery that once was tended by well paid Americans in
the U.S. or Alaskan oil drilled in wildlife refuges is sent to Japan.
The boots and uniforms worn by US soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq
are made in China.The Keystone Pipeline from Canada to Texas that is being considered will create incredible pollution in Canada, along its route through the breadbasket of America and in Texas. It will produce bottom of the barrel sludgey diesel that will be exported.

Imports may create a few loudly touted jobs , but their main product
is quiet but spectacular profits for transnational corporations that
export our employment while importing low quality products and
selling them here for a slight or no reduction in price.

"Free
trade" laws are promoted so that American corporations can export
pollution finally regulated here and import tariff-free goods back
into the US from their foreign subsidiaries in whatever Sweatshop
Republic they can find the cheapest workers. NAFTA is a codified
example of this policy carried out at a national level.
More recent attempts at promoting other free trade agreements have been thwarted by citizen activism.

"Both GE workers and the community of Fort Wayne got swindled. In
1988, the employees had agreed to a $1.20 per hour wage cut to
prevent their jobs from being moved to Mexico. Then in 1992, GE
managed to squeeze a $485,290 tax cut out of the local government,
claiming it was necessary to defray the cost of new machinery needed
to preserve jobs. Once NAFTA passed, the wage cuts and the tax breaks
were not enough to keep those jobs in Fort Wayne.[they went to
Mexico] As one longtime GE employee put it, "You give them
all your life, and this is what they give you. "

Looking at the joblessness and poverty sweeping Indiana now it's no wonder that people were upset. Too bad they didn't prevail.

(Wonder
if he and his family and friends will actively boycott G.E. products
and services? We hope so.)

The
following came into our mailbox.

Maytag: Hecho
en Mejico

"They want
Americans to buy their products, but they
don't want to put Americans to work making
those products."

Published on Tuesday, December 31, 2002
by the Chicago Tribune

The Big Lie About Free
Trade

Turns out it's American
workers who are waving goodbye to

their jobs

by Bernie Sanders

Though I am a congressman
from Vermont, it outrages me that Maytag
Corp. will shut down production at its
refrigerator factory in Galesburg, Ill.,
and lay off the plant's 1,600 workers by
late 2004. Maytag is using the North
America Free Trade Agreement, which I
opposed, to move its plant to Mexico. In
Mexico it will be able to hire workers at
$2 an hour, rather than pay the average
wage of $15.14 earned by workers in
Galesburg. And the Newton, Iowa, appliance
manufacturer is closing its Illinois plant
despite recent concessions from the union
and substantial sums of corporate welfare
given it by city, county and state
governments.

Illinois citizens should
have no illusions that what is happening
in Galesburg is unique. I can tell you
that the same thing is happening in my
state. In fact, it's happening in many
regions of the country. In Vermont, in
recent years, as a result of such
disastrous trade policies as NAFTA,
most-favored-nation status with China and
permanent normal trade relations with
China and other trade agreements, we have
lost thousands of decent paying jobs in
Shaftsbury, Newport, St. Johnsbury, East
Ryegate, Island Pond, Randolph, Orleans,
Bennington, Springfield and Windsor--among
other communities.

The simple truth is that our
nation's manufacturing base is collapsing.
As unemployment rises, more and more
Americans are searching for non-existent
jobs. In the past two years we have lost
just under 1.8 million factory jobs
nationwide, according to the Bureau of
Labor Statistics, and, at 16.5 million, we
now have the lowest number of factory jobs
in 40 years.

As the U.S. produces less
and imports more, we have developed a huge
trade deficit of more than $400 billion,
including an $80 billion trade deficit
with China. Millions of Americans are
working longer hours for lower wages, many
of them at part-time or temporary jobs
with minimal benefits. And yet, despite
all of this, President Bush, almost all
Republicans and many Democrats in Congress
continue to spout the corporate line about
how wonderful unfettered "free trade" is.
And the establishment media continue, in
editorial after editorial, to repeat that
big lie.

The simple truth is that
American workers cannot, and should not,
be "competing" against desperate workers
in developing countries who are forced to
work for pennies an hour. This is creating
a horrendous "race to the bottom." Aaron
Kemp is a Maytag worker in Galesburg. He
expressed a lot more understanding of our
current trade policies than most member of
Congress when he told a reporter; "This is
heartbreaking. This is one of the most
unpatriotic, most un-American things I can
imagine a company doing. They want
Americans to buy their products, but they
don't want to put Americans to work making
those products."

Clearly, we need fundamental
changes in our trade policies. If the
American economy is going to survive, if
our workers are to earn a living wage,
corporations are going to have to start
reinvesting in the United
States.

In Washington, everybody
knows what the story is. President Bush
and many members of Congress have received
hundreds of millions in campaign
contributions from the corporations that
benefit from our free trade policies. They
have taken those donations--and sold out
American workers by giving their support
to a trade policy that is destroying our
economy. If the U.S. is going to survive
as a great economic power, we must rebuild
our manufacturing base and create jobs
that pay workers a living wage with decent
benefits.

Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)
is the only independent congressman in the
House.

For purposes of review. We encourage you to subscribe to newspapers like this that print real news like this.

"Last August, construction-worker Troy Renault, his wife Tammy, and their five children were living in a comfortable, three-bedroom home in Lebanon, Tennessee. Mike Osborne reports
for Voice of America News that the family now resides in a donated trailer on a local campground, having downgraded from about 1900 square feet to about 215.
The Renault family's slide into homelessness started nearly two years ago when Troy lost his construction job. Troy Renault told Osborne that when the money got tight, the family started having to make some difficult choices. "You wind up starting to think to yourself, 'Okay. Do we go ahead and make the house payment and keep a roof over our head but have no lights and no water, or do you go ahead and keep those utilities on and forego the house payment, and hope that you can get it caught up?' And it just kept going where it got further and further behind until we wound up losing the home."

The
actual manufacture of products becomes almost a nuisance for
conglomerates anxious to grow their capital and maximize profits
through buying and closing factories, raiding pension plans, firing
workers and using the paper losses to offset profits made elsewhere.
That's what slaves in foreign countries are for. BUT, how will
Americans buy thier products if they no longer have jobs and if they
do have jobs why shouldn't we go out of our way to boycott these job
destroying companies? After reading the above story we will do
everything we can to encourage everyone we know to boycott all
Maytag products. According to the highly respected and
non-commercial Consumer Reports Magazine they were
never that good to begin with. (based on hundreds of thousands of
subscriber surveys detailing the strengths and weaknesses of consumer
goods)

Even service jobs are now also vulnerable to export.
Some companies are now using low
wage workers in Ireland
or India to staff their technical-support and order-taking phone
lines or do insurance underwriting. There is no technical reason why
any person answering a telephone or sitting at a keyboard has to
be physically located in the U.S. What we're talking about is you
calling a softwear or warranty line and talking to someone making
$1.10 a day in India or China. Nor are professionals immune from
this.
The same blind, unquestioning acceptance of consumerism will allow
the export of even these service jobs if the companies that attempt
this are not challenged by consumers.

EnvironmentalCOSTS
OF CONSUMERISM

Consumerism causes the
wasteful use of energy and material far above and beyond
that needed for everyday living at a comfortable
level.

Money is not the only way to
measure the cost of an item. When one adds up all the raw
materials and energy that go into the goods and services
consumed over an individual's lifetime, the toll on the
environment is staggering. When this cost is multiplied
out over the lifespan of families, cities and countries,
the proportions are incredible.

An
example: 220 Billion cans, bottles, plastic cartons and paper cups,
are thrown away each year in the "developed" world.

"Disposable"
items exemplify this. Rather than compete on quality or reliability,
products are made for a one time use. "Fun" is a catchword discarding
notions of inherent value, longevity, and the environmental
consequences of manufacture and disposal of the product. Buying
quality products that are warranteed against failure or wearing out,
learning about the materials that things are made of, their national
origin and the conditions of the workers that make them, are some
ways of resisting consumerism and waste.

While
there may be some new appliances and cars that are more productive
and energy efficient, discarding the old often leads to an almost
total waste of the energy and material already invested in these
products. This alone may more than nullify the energy savings of the
new.

GettingAWAY
FROM CONSUMERISM

Having fewer things means enjoying what you have more and actually
getting to use it, thereby raising its intrinsic value. The less
clutter that one has in their surroundings, the fewer distractions
there are from the essentials such as family, friends, food, nature
and study. With less clutter, one needs a smaller space in which to
live comfortably and thus needs to work less to pay rent to store
things. If you haven't used something in the last year, how much
likelihood is there that you everwill use
it?

"The
most important assets are brands.
Buildings age and become dilapidated.
Machines wear out.
Cars rust.
People die.
But what lives on are the brands."

Hector
Liang
Chairman, United Biscuits
"Products are made in the factory, but brands are created in
the mind."

-Walter
Landor
Industrial Designer

"When
people have lost their authentic personal taste, they lose
their personality and become instruments of other people's
wills."

Robert
Graves

Can
brands survive ecosystem collapse or the fall of our
government?

Making do with less allows one to distance themself from the tendency
of the victims of advertising to self-define according to the
material objects possessed or not possessed, driven, drunk, worn,
used, seen with or abused.

You
usually see people thus affected in public places, lurking around a
piece of machinery, such as a car or a boat. They bask in its
radiance, act respectful and imply knowledge about its quality and
providence. They act as they feel that they should act, making sure
that others see them acting this way in the presence of the thing.
They can only communicate with each other through the medium of the
object, the cold piece of metal, in the presence of which they feel
that they can speak to each other and actually show some emotion and
interact.

The
thing, the product, becomes a longed for goal, a means of justifying
their existence, a way of envisioning themself in a different world
with possession of the thing being the key tenet. Particular speech
patterns often develop around things to the exclusion of the personal
qualities of the speaker, as in

"I
used to have a....."/"Yeah, friend of mine, he's got a "57.....",
"last night I drank two....and a six pack of....","she was
wearing..."," we did two....then a ....have you seen the
new...""...how about those Forty-Niners?..." "Look what I
got...""what do you think about American Idol?"

Empty,
hollow words, bespeaking a personal void filled by the pursuit of
things. Getting away from need for things is at least a start in
allowing people to communicate and then once communicating, beginning
to solve real problems in their home, community, nation and the
world.

*********************************

This
then is the problem. Are there any personalities that are responsable
for the negative influence of consumerism? All of us of course-how
can any one individual be at fault in this? There IS one man who
bears inordinate responsability for this, as a sidebar to this page
we would like to introduce you to a little known man who took the
techiques of his uncle, Sigmund Freud and turned them
into tools to sell to, demoralize, impoverish some people while
enriching certain others: here is his story:

Bernays
invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and
was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the
masses. He showed American corporations how they could make
people want things they didn't need by systematically
linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.
Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern
techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in
the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR
stunts, to eroticising the motorcar. His most notorious coup
was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them
that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and
freedom...

There
are a growing number of people who are aware that these aspects of
consumerism are some of the main obstacles to living in a pleasant
safe community, seeing their children well-educated and living long
healthy productive lives, without squander and waste. The following
pages offer many different tools to help facilitate
this: